Retargeting Website Visitors With Direct Mail

The very first time you were retargeted, you may have been caught off guard, or even a little freaked out. You were shopping for something online, let’s say airplane tickets for the sake of example. You added a flight to your cart but decided to check in with your fellow travelers before hitting the buy button. The next thing you know, you’re killing some time on Facebook and you see an ad for the exact flight you were considering. It’s 10% off now! What are the odds?!“This is it,” you said to yourself. “I better book this trip.”(Or, at least that’s how the marketer envisioned it when designing this customer journey).
Fast forward to 2018 and it’s safe to say consumers know perfectly placed ads like this are not a sign from the universe to make a purchase. In fact, many consumers find remarketing or retargeting ads to be more of an annoyance than a convenience—if they even see the ads at all.After years of excessive display ad retargeting, many consumers have learned to tune repetitive ads out. Some even use ad blocking software to do it for them. (According to Bannersnack, 54% of Internet users avoid banner ads).So what is a modern marketer focused on converting website visitors to do? Retarget interested shoppers in a way you know will get their attention: direct mail.Your remarketing ads are far more likely to be redeemed if sent via snail mail than web browser. According to the Direct Marketing Association, direct mail has an average response rate of 25 percent compared to display ads’ average click-through rate of .06 percent. And according to USPS, almost 60% of consumers visit websites after receiving corresponding direct mail.
Sending remarketing postcards isn’t all that complicated either. If your marketing automation platform integrates with Inkit, it is as easy as uploading your ad to our plug-and-play builder, and triggering the mail based on events (just as you would trigger remarketing emails) from your campaign builder. If your marketing stack doesn’t integrate with Inkit yet, you’ll have to generate your list from your CRM and upload it to Inkit.

5 Tips for Direct Mail Remarketing

Win back shopping cart bouncers. There are infinite reasons people leave websites before buying what’s in their carts. They have second thoughts when they see the subtotal or shipping costs. They can’t find their coupon code. They get distracted by Facebook. They slam their laptop closed when the boss walks by. Whatever the reason, these people were, at one time, just a click away from becoming your customers. Use direct mail remarketing to give them your best incentive to finish what they started.

Track every piece of data possible, and test as much as you can. First, make sure you have a clear way to measure conversions. Popular ways to do this include limiting each mailer to one CTA and using unique discount codes and special sign-up landing pages. When possible, make every mailer an A/B test. (Check out direct mail A/B test tips here.) Then, take the winning ad and continue to iterate on it.

Don’t forget about your current customers. Direct mail remarketing is great for converting interested shoppers, but you can also use retargeting to turn first-time customers into repeat customers. Create automated cross-sell and upsell campaigns to inform your customers of sales, promotions, loyalty balances, product launches and more.

Test your strongest online ads offline. Some of the best direct mail campaigns we’ve seen at Inkit started with an email promotion. If you have a promotion that works well in email, it may be likely to perform even better in a postcard. This is simply because the open rate for direct mail is generally so much higher than email, and you already have an offer that resonates. An added bonus: It cuts your lead time to reformat and port your emails right into Inkit’s plug-and-play dashboard.

Personalize it. Direct mail is no different than digital messaging in that personalized content gets results. Inkit users have customized everything from recipient’s names to their loyalty reward balances to purchase history. Direct mail remarketing performs best when it is targeted, triggered and personalized.